The Snake Charmer

A Black Eyed Story

Harmonia Rosales | Summer

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If you walk into a party with a pet python wrapped around your neck, the entire gathering (save for a few eccentrics) will shudder and cower and take the party across the room into a corner far away from you.

In order to meet and greet and mingle, you’ll have to prove that you and your neck muzzler are actually quite friendly, tame and safe. You’ll have to convince all the other guests you’re not only a reasonable and sane person, but also very loving—so loving that you would dare to embrace deadly creatures that slither.

After a considerable amount of campaigning, you might win over a few cautious guests. You might even make a few friends, but your snake will be the thing they will have to choose to ignore. It will be the thing that keeps you at arms’ length. You might garner a warm smile, but not a warm embrace. 

Funny thing is, if you walked into that same party wearing a pair of vintage python snakeskin shoes and carrying a python snakeskin designer bag, no one would shudder. Most wouldn’t even notice.

This week, I created a post for my Black Coffee With White Friends Instagram feed about how Tucker Carlson uses the word “merit” as a dog whistle to make White guys nervous about Black women taking their position in the world. 

And… Instagram “shadowbanned” my feed. 

This a first for me. At least I think. There’ve been times when I’ve posted something about race or racism or Whiteness, or White men, or White supremacy, or White women, or White nationalism, or White Christianity, etc., and my normal engagement—comments, likes and DMs—disappeared. Sometimes I assumed it was the algorithms, but most of the time I thought it was me and my writing and my terrible attitude. So I’d berate myself for the post’s failure. I’d tell myself I’m too angry and that people aren’t interested in reading the words of an angry Black woman.

The thing is: I’m not an angry Black woman with a terrible attitude. What I am is a woman who walked into a party with a pet python wrapped around my neck. The mere mention of any of the topics listed above can, has, and will clear a crowd. Don’t believe me? Bring up CRT at your next cocktail party with a predominantly White guest list. 

But if you’re Tucker Carlson, you can walk into any gathering of White-minded folks wearing CRT like an accessory. No one will bat an eye at his snake-skinned shoes and matching wallet and briefcase. Carlson can be racist as long as it’s under the cover of a fashionable print. People will reason, “It’s just a snake skin after all. I don’t like it, but it’s not like he’s wearing an actual snake!” Have they considered the cruel barbarity and brutality of what it takes to kill a snake and turn it into a pair of boots? Isn’t it odd that they feel more comfortable with the snake killer and not the snake charmer? 

The hardest thing about being a Black woman and talking about what it means to be a Black woman in a straightforward way is that no one wants to welcome us to a table if we insist on bringing a venomous, bone-crushing snake as thick as a sequoia as our plus-one. And the topic of racism is an enormous, thick-muscled, viperous, slithering serpent many people believe will swallow the table and its guests whole. So most people prefer to put up with the micro-aggressions, the dog whistles, the snake defanged and stripped of its skin. As long as it’s not an actual snake, what can be the harm? 

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Harmoina Rosales | “Ase”

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During this Black History Month, I’ve witnessed a lot of White Christians praise Black people for enduring being Black. I read a lot articles and posts written by White religious leaders who marvel at the Black faith tradition and the beauty of our ability to forgive and to withstand violence with nonviolence.

These are lovely sentiments, but at the end to the day, they’re only sentiments. Their words thud hollow in me and even feel like an insult. Is my Blackness something to be endured? Is it a hardship? I don’t think so. I know their message is meant to be sincere and loving. It’s meant to be a compliment as if to say, “I like your pet snake!”

The battles the Black church along with its leaders and its congregants have had to face—things like segregation, church bombings, arrests, lynchings and erasure—are all too often used by White pastors and leaders as life lessons about forgiveness, redemption, mercy, kindness and friendship for liberal, progressive White believers. Our suffering is tokenized and stripped of its living-and-breathing, ever-present danger. It’s presented in sermons, posts and articles like a high-end snakeskin trinket that Whiteness can carry to show off their ability to style-up what was once very much alive, deadly and dangerous.

But what would it take for White people and White-led businesses like Instagram to embrace the danger we face? So many Black people have lost their lives trying to unwind the serpent of racism from the neck of America. I wish good-meaning White people would stop using the toil and the trauma to dress up their allyship. 

I want to see liberal, progressive, non-Black believers—particularly White ones—being led by a host of Black voices that are snake-whisperers who are dedicated to taming the racist system coiled around Black people’s necks so that it can be removed without threat.

I, too, could just sit and marvel at the strength of my people. Yes! They were nonviolent, determined, and courageous—but my goodness, what choice did they have? Death and more oppression? 

Applauding a dying body for continuing to try to breathe shouldn’t be inspiring – it should be alarming.

The number of battles Black people have endured, the numerous times we’ve come close to extinction, the countless times we’ve been hounded, hung and burnt alive, shouldn’t be highlighted as holy because we did it all while remaining human and Godly. Our humanity should only shock those who never saw us as human in the first place. 

So rather than being astonished at our ability to thrive for all these years, maybe these White leaders could be more horrified at how White supremacy (from which they have benefitted) has behaved in such inhumane ways. Rather than being inspired to write and sermonize about our strength— speak the quiet truth aloud: The reason we had to be so strong was the American church’s idolatry of Whiteness.

I get it. It’s easier to stand in awe of Blackness than to stare into the beady reptilian eyes of racism. It’s easier to point out the bravery of the Black woman who shows up fighting for her life, no matter the snake tightening around her neck, than to point out the cowardice of the White man who denies the existence of the snake but dances, ironically, in snakeskin boots. 

But in order to do that, White leaders need to come to our table where we sit dangling in serpents of racial injustice, racial inequity, racial trauma and racial terror. They need to get use to feel of the way these snakes slither across our backs. They need to learn how to relax to keep the pythons from strangling us in our sleep.

If White allies could do that, maybe all of us could begin to see if it is indeed true that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” 

Then Tucker Carlson wouldn’t have any dog whistles to blow, and Instagram would have fewer antiracist activists’ accounts to shadowban.